The Song Meter configurator app can estimate how long a deployment will last based on your selected settings, schedule, battery type, and SD card sizes.
About this task
Many different settings affect how much power the SM5 draws from its batteries and how quickly it uses SD card space. The configurator app can roughly estimate how quickly the recorder will run through a given set of batteries or SD cards based on your current settings and schedule.
It is vitally important to understand the factors that will affect the SM5's battery life beyond what the configurator can predict:
- Battery performance
- Battery life estimations use the nominal capacity of high-quality batteries of various types. In real-world use, even high-quality batteries may slightly under-perform compared to their nominal specifications. Lower-capacity batteries or rechargeable batteries that have been used and recharged many times will run out of power even more quickly.
- SD card power consumption
- Battery life estimations are based on power draw we measured using three different SD cards purchased in 2025. Different SD cards draw varying amounts of power, which can have a noticeable impact on the SM5's overall power consumption and battery life. As a general trend, cards with higher capacities and faster performance tend to draw more power than cards with smaller capacities and slower performance.
- Temperature
- Battery life estimations assume typical battery performance in room temperature, but most types of batteries perform significantly worse in near-freezing temperatures. In cold weather, you should expect a significantly shorter battery life than what the app predicts.
Note: The mobile app provides a simple
interface for estimating card usage and battery life for internal batteries. To
estimate deployment length for external batteries, with or without a solar panel, we
recommend using
the desktop configurator.